This week at the IEEE RealTime
Systems Symposium I heard a fascinating keynote address by David Wilner, Chief
Technical Officer of Wind River Systems. Wind River makes VxWorks, the realtime
embedded systems kernel that was
used in the Mars Pathfinder mission. In his talk, he explained in detail the actual software problems that caused the total
system resets of the Pathfinder spacecraft, how they were diagnosed, and how they were solved. I wanted to share his story
with each of you.